As you’ve probably noticed, Raspberry Pi is a rather unusual organisation. We have two functions: we make and sell tiny computers, and we promote children’s education. These activities support each other (all the money we raise from selling Raspberry Pis is put straight back into our charitable activities), but are in many ways separate, and it’s a real juggling act directing the two together. Back at the start of the year, we split the engineering and trading activities of the Foundation into a separate, wholly owned trading subsidiary, Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd. The Raspberry Pi Foundation continues to run the charitable, educational side of things. Since then, I’ve been overseeing both organisations, but really, the two roles require two people doing them, and of necessity most of my attention has had to be devoted to the trading business.

Lance Howarth

With that in mind, I’m very pleased to be able to announce that Lance Howarth has joined us as Foundation CEO, and will be taking the lead on the Foundation’s charitable activities.

Lance spent a decade with ARM, latterly as EVP of Marketing and as a VP in the office of the CTO. He’ll be driving forward our educational mission, while I continue as CEO of Raspberry Pi (Trading) – you won’t see any big changes in my interactions with you here, at talks and so on. Hopefully we’ll be able to talk Lance into posting here on occasion too, to let you know what he and the board are up to.

You’re seeing some of the results of those charitable activities I’ve been talking about already – Clive Beale, our most excellent Director of Educational Development, is heading up the work on a growing corpus of free educational materials, running workshops, working with teachers, and with other charities; we’ve committed to take on some more people to work on our educational function too. We’re funding development of projects like Sonic Pi, the music programming environment we blogged about yesterday. We’re putting money into open educational resources, like Scratch and Squeak.

Lance will be growing our engagement with this sort of work, and I hope you’ll join me in welcoming him to the growing Raspberry Pi family. And if you want a lapel pin like his, you’ll find them in the Swag Store!

Tie? A PiTi? Nah, better call it Pi-Tie
Seriously, WANT!! As Dan3008 says it’d make a great talking point at interviews, trade shows, seminars, to customers. Cheap advertising – cheap in that the advert. actually makes money.
Only today I was recommending Coding Club books to my local library here in Oulu, Finland (standard of English amongst the kids is easily sufficient for those books), and naturally, plugged the Pi – as do the books themselves. According to Rastrack, there are only a couple of dozen Pi’s registered in Oulu, which is Finland’s Northern technology centre – it’d be great to do a bit of advertising. Grief, we can wear one in the pub on a t-shirt, why not on a tie in a more formal setting?
Go on, Liz – give it a whirl!

Welcome Lance! Hey I like the idea of a tie too… what if it had a paisley pattern but with the raspberry logo incorporated into each boteh droplet shape? That would be amazing! You could even make shirts out of the material?!

hmm
mother in law has a computer controlled sewing machine, i’ll run up an embroidered logo on CAD and see how far i get
the next obvious step is to do it from, whatsaname of that credit card size ‘puter? umm whatever.
there’s a market need just demonstrated here.

I’d thought of cufflinks, but wasn’t game to mention it. Something exxy worn in a more formal context is a risk right now ?
Seriously,
in addition to a tie, you at least might want to consider a something that can be worn either as a cravat for the guys or a scarf for the gals, would look very up-to-the-minute-corporate/governmental.

Hmmm … discreet, or discrete? Perhaps a silicon-substrate badge infused with the right metals to reflect the raspberry red, green, and black logo colors, embedded via an epitaxial deposition process just like that used to create semiconductor devices such as the Pi’s BCM2835 system on a chip (SoC). If the logo formed one or more discrete transistor gates, or, even better, transistor-switched color LED arrays, that would be soooo cool! :D

Welcome! Good to see the educational side gets the attention it deserves now. You’d have some shoes to step in to, taking over from Eben and no doubt he’ll be in touch about his ‘baby’ regularly, but if Eben’s happy to hand it to you, so should we :-) All the best in your new job, just don’t forget to be a child playing, occasionally ;-)

Hi all, just wanted to say thank you for the warm welcome messages. It is an absolute honour to join the Raspberry PI phenomena which is only made possible by you the community plus the support of the great team back here at Raspberry Pi HQ. I’m looking forward to building on the outstanding work done to date driving forward the charitable mission and will certainly be keeping you up to date on progress in the blog from time to time.
Best wishes, Lance